Final Fantasy's Seven Endless Movements
by Konstantya
Summary: An experimental series of drabbles, each concentrating on one character. [Crossover with Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman.”]
1. Desire's Kiss

General Note: I'm only going to reformat my fics so much when this site is the one at fault. So if the formatting is weird, please check out my profile for more info. Thank you.

A/N: Originally these were supposed to be a series of normal ("normal") one-shots, maybe 1000 to 2000 words in length, but I ended up going all experimental and revamping the format. So this is now a series of drabbles, exactly 300 words apiece (I've never given myself a word limit—I thought I'd try it at least once). They start in-game and follow chronological order.

Obligatory CYA: I don't own Final Fantasy VII, nor The Sandman.

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**Final Fantasy's Seven Endless Movements**

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_:one for sorrow:_

**Desire's Kiss**

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The sky is black as pitch. The moon is new. A figure slinks around sleeping Wutai like the shadow of a cat. She has forsaken robes and tea for armor and weapons, and refuses to regret it. Even if she _is_ the only daughter and only child of the ruling house.

Tradition has been dying for years, already.

She wants freedom, from both her father and her country's current state. She wants the Wutai of decades past.

She wants to see Shinra in flames and rubble. She wants to see Sephiroth impaled on his own sword with her hands on the hilt. She wants revenge, she wants honor, she wants heirs yet unborn to grow up knowing their home is as free and strong as it ever was. She wants them to know that while others, while Lord Godo himself, gave up and surrendered their culture and pride, there are those that wouldn't. She wants to live in a country not shadowed by shame and defeat and _tourism_.

She wants glory for Wutai, and she will be the one to bring it. In any way she can, no matter what the cost—to her, but preferably to others.

At the outskirts, where the land stretches and the farms begin, she spies a figure near the edge of the trees, collecting something in a basket. In the pre-dawn dim glow, she can't tell if it's an attractive woman or a downright gorgeous man, but the person looks and smiles, mouth curling like smoke from an expensive cigarette. She—or he—raises finger to hushed lips and winks with tawny yellow eyes.

The youngest surviving Kisaragi of Wutai grins slyly, turns away, and continues. She sets her mouth, absently catches the drifting fragrance of peach blossoms in the air, and feels strong.

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	2. A Dream of High Winds

**Final Fantasy's Seven Endless Movements**

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_:two for joy:_

**A Dream of High Winds  
**

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Cid Highwind is standing on grass that's too green, with a sky above him that's too blue, with a rake-thin man next to him that's too fucking creepy.

He needs a smoke, but can't find a way to light it. He swallows, glances at the wraith next to him. "Hey, uh…"

The man with wild black hair takes a long breath and produces a lit match. Bony fingers hold the flame to the cigarette.

Cid nods his head in thanks and takes a drag. The pilot regards his companion. His eyes are black as night, pitted with stars, and Cid talks around his smoke. "Shit. You sure are a creepy bastard." A smirk curls one side of his mouth up. "Actually, you remind me a lot of a guy I know…"

The man ignores this and stares at the sky. "Where are your wings, Cid Highwind?"

Cid's blood turns to battery acid and he's pissed. "My rocket's broken, my plane's trashed, and my airship was taken over by a fuckin' Shinra kid, the bratty punk."

"And your wings went with them?"

Cid doesn't ask questions, because he doesn't need the answers. He flicks his cigarette butt to the grass and grinds it out with the heel of his boot, all the while wishing it's Rufus Shinra's head under his foot instead. "Whatever," he spits out bitterly. "My lifelong dream ain't more than shit now, that's the truth of the matter."

The tall man looks at the remains of the cigarette, then returns his disconcerting gaze to the heavens. When he speaks, his reverberating voice sounds amused:

"Sometimes dreams are more important than truths."

When Cid Highwind wakes, he knows why he is there: to kick ass (corporate or otherwise), to drink tea and smoke cigarettes, but most importantly, to fly.

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A/N: _This_ is really the piece that garnered the whole thing a T rating. Cid just wouldn't be Cid if he didn't swear. XD


	3. Destiny Fills the Air

**Final Fantasy's Seven Endless Movements**

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_:three for a girl:_

**Destiny Fills the Air  
**

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Somehow she has wandered into the courtyard of a garden. "Oh! I'm sorry. I didn't mean to intrude…"

A towering pillar of a robed man turns. "It was written that you would visit, so you have done so." He closes the enormous book he is holding. It is chained to his wrist, and his eyes appear blind.

Aeris is unsure of what to do, and her eyes wander to a row of portraits. "…Who are they?"

"My brothers and sisters. Personifications of what every living thing is destined to do."

Her gaze settles on one of a girl dressed in black. Kind eyes, a warm smile—beautiful, comfort, home.

"Love?" Aeris smiles.

He corrects her. "She is what lies at the end of everything."

Aeris's smile falls and an uncomfortable realization slides into her heart. "But…she looks so nice!"

He says nothing.

For a long moment she stares at the portrait. "…I'm going to die, aren't I?" But she already knows. "You know what's going to happen…"

"Yes."

Aeris smiles sadly. "But…you can't tell me."

"It would change nothing."

She sighs. For everything she will miss. For everything that will miss _her._ "…Does free will _ever_ exist?" she murmurs.

"Perhaps one is destined to have free will."

She truly smiles, then. She clasps her hands, nods her head in deference. "It's been an honor. You have a lovely garden. Complicated," she adds.

Maybe he sounds amused, maybe not. "The paths one takes in life are rarely simple."

Another flash of a sad smile, and she nods. "I'm afraid I have to get back to mine," she says with acceptance.

"Yes," he nods.

He reopens his book. As she walks out of the courtyard, the garden fades to empty streets and her boots echo softly in the City of the Ancients.

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A/N: Oh, man, Aeris's was a bitch, probably because it was mostly dialogue. It was originally somewhere around 650 words, and I miraculously managed to cut it down to my planned 300. If I wasn't so damn stubborn, I probably would have said screw it and left it at 400 or something. I'm kind of iffy about this one, but then again, I've never done Aeris before.


	4. The Locked Heart of Despair

**Final Fantasy's Seven Endless Movements**

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_:four for a boy:_

**The Locked Heart of Despair  
**

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The nights are worse than the days, she realizes. Once night falls and Mideel sleeps, there are no distractions to keep her occupied. No flurry of doctors and nurses running around. No people to put on a show of hope for.

Nights where all she can do is think and wonder and worry. About the boy she once knew who is something more than a friend and something less than a boyfriend, and yet absolutely neither. About her friends, past and present, already lost and simply distant. About the planet, torn and on the verge of breaking apart. About herself.

Nights where a tired glance in a mirror shows eyes that she doesn't recognize as her own. Nights where she jerks, as if waking from a dream, but filled with the distinct feeling that she had never actually fallen asleep, her mind still carrying the image of a woman sitting across from her.

She is always ugly and haggard, her skin bare and ashen, her eyes pinched points in a pockmarked face. Her teeth are jagged yellow and black things that look as if they were torn from the jaw of one of the monsters she has fought, her hair thin and stringy, collected in a dirty knot on top of her head. Her body is opulent in a disgustingly crude way. She plays with a hooked ring, digging it into her flesh and silently crying for the fighter when she refuses to cry for herself, when she is too tired to cry for the young man who lies lost on the bed in front of her.

She is not comforting, but she is there. And Tifa finds that somehow better than an empty room in a shadowed world, filled with the shadowed echoes of a boy and a girl.

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	5. Clouded Delirium

**Final Fantasy's Seven Endless Movements**

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_:five for silver:_

**Clouded Delirium  
**

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"You lost something," a young voice tells him.

Cloud wonders when she showed up. He wonders when _he_ showed up. He wonders why butterflies are fluttering through her hair and why fish are swimming around the air. He wonders why her eyes don't match, one a darkish blue and the other a green that swirls with something else.

He wonders why he responds with "yes." He can't remember what he has lost.

The girl with clothes that flow like a broken mirror grabs his hand and walks. There are stars that taste of telephones and a fluffy pool of sky. "You've been looking for weeks and hours and seconds, you know?"

She blows into her hands, as if forming a bubble. Another fish flies out around them, scales shimmering.

"But what did I lose?" he asks.

Her hair waves at him. "You got lost." She nods, and a butterfly swims around. "Umm. People are always hard to find because they change and aren't the same anymore. It's hard," she says. "I lost me once."

Cloud thinks, but it's hard to remember. The girl cups her hands and purses her mouth to bubble another fish into flight, but suddenly halts and looks at him. "Oh," she says simply, innocently, eyes wide. "She found the you you lost."

The landscape fades to solid. Voices sweep it away into a conscious dustpan and a swirl of sunlight throws it away as he opens his eyes to anxious brown irises.

He recovers and hope is renewed and friends have returned, and the sun sparkles off the sea as he climbs to the airship. The ex-SOLDIER who never was and doesn't need to be recalls a flicker of a goldfish floating past his vision in mismatched green and blue, but he can't figure out why.

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A/N: I like Cloud in the respect that he's a complicated character, but I also find him a bitch to write for the very same reason. I'm pretty sure this was one of the first pairings that came to mind when the general concept first came to me. I mean, it's practically a given. (That crazy Cloud Strife! Of course he would be with Delirium!)


	6. Walls of Destruction

**Final Fantasy's Seven Endless Movements**

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_:six for gold:_

**Walls of Destruction  
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Salvaging crews came and went, and all that's left is twisted metal and concrete, so it's a surprise to see another person on the overlooking bluff.

"Payin' your respects?" he guesses, glancing at perhaps the only other man who is the same build as himself.

"It was something I once had a great association with," he says in answer, nodding towards the rubble.

Barret bristles and his posture stiffens. "Shinra?" he makes himself ask, the name still biting his tongue, despite how the company is no longer.

The red-headed giant explodes with a hearty laugh. "No—ruins!" he clarifies.

His good nature is infectious, and Barret soon finds himself chuckling along. "You were some sorta archaeologist?" he finally asks.

"Oh, no, no," the man says, thick auburn eyebrows coming together in denial. "Nothing like that. Just…interested in change, I guess you could say."

Barret sighs, looking out at the rubble. "I sure hope this'll change things."

The other man nods. "It will."

"You sound pretty sure a'yourself."

He smiles with something akin to fondness, eyes scanning the wreckage. "Something has been destroyed. Now something new must come." He shifts his weight, turns, steps away from his spot. A hearty hand claps Barret on the shoulder, and the man grins broadly. "Don't worry so much, my friend," he says, ambling away from the ruins. "If there's one thing I've learned, it's that most of the time these things sort themselves out just fine on their own."

He watches him leave, takes one last look at what used to be Midgar, and also turns to leave. Barret Wallace suddenly feels good. Change will come, and it should happen with more than just mako energy. After all, there's a little girl he's been away from for far too long waiting for her father.

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A/N: Eh, I'm kind of iffy on this one, but Barret needs more lovin' in the fan fiction community. ;)


	7. Death On Valentine's Day

**Final Fantasy's Seven Endless Movements**

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_:seven for a secret:  
(never to be told)_

**Death On Valentine's Day  
**

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Vincent Valentine sighs as he tries his best to avoid Kalm's spring festival. A festival will not help him. Almost two years since he was woken from Nibelheim and he still wonders if what he has done is enough.

A tap on his arm pulls him from his thoughts.

A young woman, petite and girlish. She cocks her head at him and smiles with all the welcoming warmth anyone could ever need or want.

A flash of a memory he doesn't care to own: A white coat, a smoking barrel, knees cracking against tile, a blue suit staining black with blood, a comforting hand he _almost_ reached, the painful jerk away from it, back into consciousness, back into _life_.

She slips one hand around his elbow, where metal connects to flesh, and begins walking. "Come on, Vincent. Since I'm here, I want to get a hotdog."

She drags him to a vendor, asks for two, and receives them free of charge. She hands him one and begins eating hers. As the festival continues around them, he merely regards his food. He has enough unwanted chemicals in him already.

"Why?" he finally asks.

"Because you need to get on with your life," she responds simply. "And because hotdogs taste good in such a terrible way."

"…You didn't come here for me," he states.

She finishes her hotdog and gives him a chiding look, as if she were a mother or an older sister, and motions for him to bend down. She kisses him on the cheek, smiles, and says, "Don't look so mopey. I'll see you around again." Then she is gone, and he is left with a hotdog. He looks at it and comes to a strangely pleasant realization of mortality.

Vincent Valentine will hear the sound of her wings.

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A/N: I'll admit, at first I wanted to stick Vincent with Dream, but they just seemed too similar to me. All I could imagine was Dream saying something like, "It's my responsibility to give you nightmares," and Vincent saying, "It's my responsibility to suffer them." And then, maybe if they felt oddly talkative, they could bond over the fact that both their love lives bite. I figured Vincent would work better with Death, anyway. And the idea of Cid swearing at Dream was just too damn good to pass up. XD

My only real regret about this is that I wasn't able to do one for Red XIII (another character that needs more lovin'). Unfortunately he didn't make the cut like Barret did. Sorry, Red. Maybe another time.

The lines at the beginning of each piece (One for sorrow, two for joy, etc.) are each a line of a common little rhyme. This rhyme happened to be used in _The Sandman_ (volume six, I believe), which was why I chose to use it as a sort of way of numbering the "chapters."

Well, at any rate, it is done! I want to give a very heartfelt thanks to all of you who read and reviewed this crazy little series of mine!


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